IS THE CORONAVIRUS DRIVING USER-GENERATED LEARNING CONTENT?

During this time of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the
Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) has been hearing that some
organizations are encouraging, and even relying on, user-generated learning
content, e.g., on timely topics such as remote working, virtual teams, virtual
leadership, and more. Facing sudden and extensive change, employees have needed
to learn quickly how best to adjust and stay as productive as possible.

In fact, nearly half (46%) of those surveyed this week said their organizations are either leveraging user-generated learning content more, or plan to encourage it more, as work has largely shifted to home offices.

User-generated learning content includes any content created
by employees to enhance others’ learning that was not intentionally designed
and delivered by L&D professionals. The concept has been exciting and
powerful in this age of rapid change that requires business agility and low
cost solutions, and has represented a refreshing alternative to long training
programs (whether instructor-led classroom or long e-Learning modules) that
quickly become out of date and gather dust on the physical or digital shelf.

That said, challenges for user-generated learning content continue
to exist, with survey respondents noting the following:

On that last point, survey respondents indicated a broad
range of tools they are variously using from smartphones and Zoom to capture
video, collaboration platforms like Teams and Slack to coordinate content
creation, Sharepoint and LMSes to host content, learning experience platforms
(LXP) to curate content, and more.

Given current trends, challenges, and attitudes,
user-generated learning content will no doubt continue to grow, but do so inconsistently
across organizations for some time to come. Only time will tell if the COVID-19
pandemic will be an inflection point in that growth trajectory, but early data
suggests it very well could be.

Other findings from the survey:

29% said their organizations were already big proponents of user-generated learning content, and another 15% said they try to encourage it but have had difficulty gaining traction in the past.

Only 30% indicated that they consider such content to be highly or very highly effective, but a far lower 7% said it was not very effective.

Only 7% said they do not encourage user-generated learning content, due to concerns such as accuracy, liability, etc.

Download the full survey results—due to the current global
health and productivity crisis affecting everyone, i4cp is making all related
ongoing research publicly available.

We also encourage you to visit i4cp.com/coronavirus for other
employer resources including discussion forums, next practices, useful
resources, and more.